Business blasts abbotts parental leave plan
Updated
The Government has criticised the Abbott Government's plan to allow a voluntary parental leave scheme for some people who care for children to get an education.
The move, which comes with a $100,000 start-up grant, will be phased in from July 2016.
It is similar to the scheme that will be rolled out in the Northern Territory after it was set up by Labor but has received an overwhelming response from businesses, teachers and students.
A spokesman for the Prime Minister, Bill English, said the Government's focus was on "job creation" and "getting the economy moving".
"The Prime Minister is not concerned about the idea of children being placed in education," he said.
But the Northern Territory Government has called the Government's plan "absurd".
Opposition Employment, Women and the Family Minister Linda Burney said there was little value in having a voluntary scheme set up.
Ms Burney said the scheme, if implemented, could only benefit low income earners and would do nothing to help the needy.
It would also hurt employment rates at the bottom end of the earnings distribution, she said.
"One of the biggest things the government needs to be concerned about is they can't rely on those people coming through," she said.
Ms Burney said the scheme would make parents even more dependent on public services.
"The Government doesn't seem to understand how big a factor in society's economic activity it is when someone is getting paid below the minimum wage," she said.
Opposition employment spokesman Brendan O'Connor said the proposal failed the middle class.
"The idea this is going to work wonders for them is laughable," he said.
"These people will suffer, and the people at the bottom in society won't benefit - they'll suffer."
Mr O'Connor said the Government was putting its children first, including in the decision.
"It's about making sure kids can stay at the school they go to, and not come out and spend another three months and go back to work."
In July, a Victorian Liberal MP called on the Government to scrap the scheme and allow people to opt out of it if they wanted to go to university.
However, this week the Australian Federation of Students said the Government should introduce a scheme instead.
Topics: government-and-politics, federal-government, brisbane-4000
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Young penguins starve after early breeding season ends (Credit: Triton Research Institute)
By looking at the number and size of eggs in a colony, Triton can calculate the age and extent of a colony and predict how much time it takes to complete a nest and produce a young pup, said Zong.
"I've spent many hours watching penguins in the wild and I've seen more immature penguins that are still about two months old than I have a full year old," Zong told LiveScience. "In the wild, juveniles are very dependent on their parents, so the adult penguins don't need to spend a lot of time with them. But in nature, especially in warm water, it's more of a motherly role for the juveniles."
Zong and Triton used the temperature readings to estimate how long a colony is likely to last based on a colony's size and the average number of penguins it is able to produce. To estimate how long it takes to obtain a breeding pair, he said the researchers would compare two colonies.
For example, if penguins in a small, cold location had 100,000 eggs, they would take between 1 and 2 weeks to gather up the eggs and incubate them in a single egg, Zong said. In the warmer, more humid climate, he estimated the time to gather up an egg could be as much as one week.
The authors noted that it has been known for at least 300 million years that penguins use an egg as a means to raise fresh eggs to adulthood. The eggs of this species, the adult Antarctic king penguin, do not require incubation.
In addition to the temperature and egg temperatures, Triton also measured the type of water in the colony (air, water, mud, fresh water), time taken to produce the same eggs (an hour, 30 minutes), time taken to process the eggs (an hour, 30 minutes), and water temperature (the temperature inside the incubator) to identify when penguins were most likely to lay a male or a female penguin.
When the researchers measured the oxygen level of the water and found it significantly higher at higher temperatures than on average, it did not show up in any of the results, according to Zong. That meant that penguin eggs were incubated in water with high oxygen content, and they would not hatch.
The findings were published in the journal Biology Letters.
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